Abstract
Arabic Sign Language (ArSL) is considered the native language for more than 17 million deaf people in the Arab world. There exist a major communication gap between the deaf and the hearing people, which can be attributed to the lack of proper communication technologies.
This technical paper presents the design and implementation of a mobile system that converts written Arabic text to ArSL using a signing avatar that operates on mobile phones. The system takes into consideration the linguistic idiosyncrasies of Arabic language as well as employs text-to-sign-language animation. The main contribution of this system resides in its novel approach for processing Arabic text and animating a 3D signing avatar within minimum computational resources found in mobile phones.